Ruby is one of the best object-oriented languages around. Ubiquitous objects, duck-typing, mixins, expressive syntax with low ceremony, powerful reflection and metaprogramming. But Ruby has a mixed heritage that incorporates functional and procedural models along with OOP. This flexibility provides many options for how to solve problems, but it can also lead even experienced developers into a confusing mix of programming styles and hard-to-understand software designs. But what can we do to keep things simple and easy to understand?

Alan Kay is often quoted as saying “Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.” So let’s get the right perspective on Ruby and look at it from the direction of objects and OOP. This talk examines the fundamental concepts of object-orientation, and presents a simple model for how to think about objects and object-oriented programming. Why are objects so useful? What makes object-oriented programs easy to write and maintain? What are the pitfalls of not keeping to the OOP model? And how many slides can it take to explain two sentences? We’ll answer all these questions and more!

Code. Why? Do what for what?

Adventures in software development.

Everyone acknowledges that the software field has an issue with gender balance, but there are many arguments about what to do about it. The social justice community uses the term ‘anti-oppression’ to describe techniques for being more inclusive to people of a wide variety of backgrounds, ethnicities, sexualities, and genders. Software developers generally lack exposure to these terms and techniques.

In this talk, Steve and Lindsey will introduce basic anti-oppression concepts, and provide specific examples of situations where we as software developers can use these tools to engender a more inclusive community.

To call it a key-value store would be an understatement. To call it a database would be an overstatement. To call it NoSQL would be cause for defenestration. Redis, quite simply, stands on its own as a remarkable way to store data structures: strings, lists, sets, sorted sets, and hashes.

This talk will articulate the significance and elegance of its design and explore some conventional and rather unconventional ways that you can use Redis in your own applications. If you’re new to Redis, prepare to fall in love, and even if you’re already quite enamored, you’ll definitely enjoy the section about best practices and advanced usage.

Contributing to Open Source can be a fun and rewarding experience. Whether you’ve run in to bugs that need to be fixed, or you would just like to give back to the community, this talk will be a practical guide to getting involved in the world of Open Source Software. Topics will range from bug reporting and patch submission to team dynamics, but with an emphasis on practical aspects. Stories will be told, patches will be made, but remember: Having a luck dragon with you is the only way to go on a quest.

It’s a well-known fact that start-ups and small business just do not have the purchasing power that the big guys have. That goes for everything from paper clips to software licenses. In the past, the major players in the VoiceXML space required serious contract commitments and high monthly minimums to provide the ability to generate telephone communications and text messages. Well, little guys rejoice! Now there is Twilio, a pay-as-you-go telecom platform written for web developers by web developers that provides an affordable, not to mention easy, way to integrate phone communications into applications.

This talk will cover everything you need to get your application up and running with Twilio and even provide real-time examples. For experienced rubyists and beginners alike, if you’ve ever considered or have been tasked with integrating telephone and text communications into your applications, Twilio just might be what you’re looking for.

Every Ruby developer uses the Rake program all the time, whether to run the database migrations in their Rails project or to just execute their tests. Some might have even written their own rake tasks to help them perform some menial development task.

But Rake has capabilities far beyond just simple task automation. Rake is a fine grained, dependency driven, build tool that knows how to transform files, walk directory trees, and serve you supper. And it does it with the minimal possible effort. (I might have lied about the supper.)

In this talk we will cover the “hidden” features of Rake that are not typically used by the casual Rake user. We will learn about the convenience of file lists, dynamic generation of tasks, rule based file generation and more. Come learn about Power Rake.

MOTIVATION: I’ve noticed lately that a lot of people are writing rake tasks that just barely scratch the surface of the capabilities that are embedded in rake. They manually build lists of files rather than use FileLists. They use clumsy regular expressions to manipulate file names rather than use the pathmap command. And they use coarse grained dependencies to rebuild the world rather than really defining what their dependencies are. This talk is me doing my little bit to help folks use Rake more effectively.

We spend a large portion of our time thinking about code and technical project issues. What about the people side of things? The majority of project failures occur because of people, not technology. What we need are guides that help us navigate the waters between the people around us.

People Patterns introduces my latest effort to capture the subtleties and nuances of interpersonal relations. I’m distilling a lot of experience, a bit of psychology and a substantial amount of research and have come up with a series of patterns that can help everyone be more successful in teams and at work. How do you have those critical conversations? How do you get your point across when you think the other person is incompetent? Come and help me reveal these and join a lively discussion.